The Splintered Door
by BodoniBold
Summary: Social anxiety has Katniss struggling to leave her apartment. Can she move beyond this pain or will she stay behind the locked door? modern Everlark AU.
1. Chapter 1

From behind her locked door, Katniss heard the echo of happy voices and of passing feet, people walking down the hall as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

She listened to the happy chatter of her neighbors headed for the bank of elevators and took stock of the door in front of her. It was a nice door: the paint glossy and green, the knob bronze, the lock simple. All she had to do was twist the lock to the left and the knob to the right. Easy.

 _Yeah, about as easy as turning into a bird and flying out the window._

Every breath came as a gasping panic, quick sawing breaths that whistle on the inhale. This shouldn't be so hard. _It shouldn't_. She opened the door every Tuesday, she'd done it ever since—

 _No_ , she pushed that thought away. She had the rest of the morning to have those kinds of thoughts dredged up—dredged up, deep fried, and served to _him_ with a side of coleslaw.

The elevator dinged and the laughter trailed and faded away, leaving Katniss still staring at her lock. From their voices, Katniss knew that the group was the trio of girls who lived in 8-B: Johanna, Annie, and Madge. They joked and laughed and argued about whose turn it was to buy milk. They went to movies. They were normal.

She imagined herself joining them, another laughing girl walking easily out the door, not seeing it as some Olympic barrier.

 _8:30 a.m._ If she didn't leave in the next fifteen minutes she would be late and _he_ would know she failed. Thinking about _his_ mocking expression was enough to make her reach for the knob.

Right hand turns the knob right.

The knob turned in her grasp and she pushed forward, but nothing happened. She pushed harder. Nothing.

She'd forgotten to turn the lock.

Every breath came out a shallow wheeze. _Okay, start over_. _Just start over_. She reached for the lock, this time with a hand shaking, a disembodied hand that didn't seem part of her body. The metal rattled beneath her fingers. If she didn't get it this time, if she couldn't make it…

The door across the hall from hers opened, the wood making a brisk scraping sound against carpet. Katniss could almost sense the press of foreign air as it crept under her own door, almost smell the piney scent of turpentine, a familiar scent coming from that apartment.

The other door clicked shut. Keys jangled. A lock tumbled into place.

And then the pause. Always the pause.

Peeta Mellark stood on the other side of her door. Peeta Mellark, her neighbor, who should have been finger-painting with kindergartners twenty minutes ago.

Peeta Mellark. The ex-love-of-her-life.

Katniss felt like he could see her straight through the door.

She closed her eyes and covered her mouth with both hands to smother the jagged noise. She didn't want to give Peeta any reason to knock, any reason to use the house key she'd never gotten back. She didn't want him thinking about her at all. Why was he even _there_? She'd purposefully made the Tuesday appointment after he was supposed to be gone.

 _Go_ , she willed. _Just go._ She'd said those words once before, almost a year ago. They were the last words she'd said to him. Screamed through this same door, ripped from her heart and her throat, those words were meant to excise him from her life forever.

The room was suddenly sizzling hot. Sweat prickled her scalp, her armpits, her groin.

 _Go_ , she willed again.

And then he was walking down the hall. Ding went the elevator and he was gone.

She sank down to the ground, curling her hands up around her knees, and bowing her head into the hollowed out cup between her body and her bent legs. She wouldn't go. She didn't care what _he_ said or thought. She'd call and say she was sick. Reschedule. She'd have to talk to _her_ , but she'd have to talk to _her_ either way.

 _But, I got ready today_. _I got out of bed and put on clothes—all for this_. The thought was tiny and sad. Her world had shrunk to the four walls of her apartment and a weekly two-block trip had become the highlight.

 _Stay or go?_ For three heartbeats she studied the frayed knee of her jeans and fought a battle in her mind. Go won out and she unfurled herself and stared at the door again.

One breath.

She turned the lock.

Another breath.

She turned the knob.

Another push and the door creaked open an inch. Katniss grabbed her messenger bag and stepped out into the cool air of the hall. Head down, Katniss walked to the bank of elevators, fast, so she wouldn't have to think about it.

Two fake ferns guarded the four elevator doors. Katniss stalked across the tile floor, not making a sound. If she were lucky, she would have the elevator to herself.

She pressed the button and finally, the elevator dinged for her. The doors clinked open. Katniss took a step forward before she realized that someone was already standing there.

"Katniss!" the voice was astonished, awe-struck, and... familiar, a voice that once meant hope and a future, but now only meant pain. Katniss steeled herself against the jumble of emotions that voice triggered in her chest.

She raised her eyes to see Peeta Mellark.

There wasn't enough steel in the world to prop up the unstable shelf of her heart. It toppled over, spilling everything she'd cautiously put back into place, all the fears and doubts and shiny good memories she just couldn't throw away.

She hadn't come face-to-face with Peeta Mellark in almost a year. She'd organized her life so she never saw him. Why did he come back up the elevator? Why was he still here when he was already so late? In all her years of knowing him, she couldn't remember him ever being late for anything.

Over and over her throat worked to swallow, dry convulsion that rolled from her mouth to her gullet.

"Katniss." This time the word was a prayer. His arm struck out, forcing the closing elevator door to clank and wheeze back open. He stared at her, his blue eyes still x-ray, but this time peering through flesh and bone to see the heart of her.

She didn't know if she could move away from those eyes. She was concrete, a statue molded into place for him to view. Her heart kept trying to force the thick sludge of her blood through her veins and she could feel every pulse. Time slowed to the ticks between heartbeats.

"You're outside." He was still using that prayer voice, like he was witnessing a miracle.

And she wasn't outside. He was standing between her and outside.

The other elevator clattered open and Katniss lunged for it. She clung to the silver rail in the center as the door closed. She considered pushing the emergency button so she could hide in there for a while. Hide and not go to her appointment. Because _he_ would want to hear about this and somehow _he_ would know. But she didn't.

The elevator landed on the first floor and Katniss picked herself up.

Peeta could have ridden his elevator down and be waiting to ambush her, but she doubted it. He hadn't tried to talk to her in months. After the last time, he knew that forcing her into a corner was the worst possible thing he could do.

But doubt wasn't certainty and Katniss understood that odds couldn't be trusted. She walked on silent feet through the lobby, watching for the ash-blond hair, the broad shoulders, the blue eyes.

He wasn't there and Katniss made her way to the door. Two more tries and she made it to the sidewalk. The noise of the city blew through her, instant and impossibly loud. Cars careered forward in flashes of blacks, silvers, and yellows, ate the asphalt as they dashed to and from all their different somewheres. The gray buildings tore at the milk-pale sky. And there were people everywhere, erratic, noisy, impossible-to-trust human beings.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

 ***This chapter has a trigger warning. Please scroll to the end for details.**

Katniss wrapped her arms around herself, tucked both hands into her armpits and jog-walked the two blocks to her appointment. The squat one-story building was hunched down, a rejected relic squished between two newer, taller skyscrapers, the overall effect depressing.

She pulled open the door and stepped inside.

A row of three faded blue chairs sat vacant in the waiting room while _Good Morning America_ blared from the television anchored to the wall.

Effie Trinket dressed, as usual, in eye-squintingly bright colors, sat behind the reception desk, flipping through the latest gossip rag. Katniss signed her name on the clipboard. She checked the time on the large clock behind Effie and wrote in 8:52 a.m.

"On time today, my poor dear," Effie said. "Much better than before." Effie always called Katniss 'my poor dear' as if her saccharine—probably fake—pity could make Katniss feel better. It didn't, but Katniss never bothered to tell her. When dealing with Effie, Katinss' goal was to make every conversation as quick and painless as possible.

The woman reached out with her fire-engine red nails to pat Katniss' hand. Katniss forced herself to keep still under the woman's touch. She didn't like anyone touching her, but _he_ claimed that she had to adapt.

Effie waved her into a seat. Ten minutes later, _he_ opened the door, looking as though someone had scraped him off the floor the night before. He wore a grayish shirt that, once upon a time, was probably white, paired badly with brown cargo shorts. Stains and scorn clung to him in equal measure.

Katniss despised him.

Dr. Haymitch Abernathy served as her psychologist. She said _served_ because, despite the degrees hanging in his office, Katniss couldn't believe anyone would certify this man to counsel human beings.

Her pet-theory was that Haymitch was really an ex-patient and had somehow killed the real Dr. Abernathy, but, she tolerated him because he was the only psychologist within walking distance. Weekly meeting with a psychologist were required for her to receive disability payments and so she showed up, simple as that.

In the hospital, she had seen a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Aurelius, but Katniss was never going back there. Anyway, he hadn't been any more helpful than Dr. Abernathy, just nicer in his uselessness, all "I'm-here-when-you-want-to-talk" and "the-healing-process-takes-time". She still had to talk to him, but only every few months or so because he prescribed her medicine. They did it through her computer.

Dr. Abernathy dropped onto his ratty plaid couch and Katniss perched on the leather chair that had been repaired several times with black duct tape.

He watched her while Katniss watched the scattered books on his desk. The titles changed every appointment. The first time Katniss saw him, the stacked books read like a laundry list about addiction. After she came back the second week, the bookcase included _Treating Psychological Trauma & PTSD_, _Sibling Loss_ , and _Resolving Difficult Clinical Syndromes_ —little cheat sheets on her. All these months later, he'd rotated back to addiction.

Like everything else Dr. Abernathy touched, these books were battered, dog-eared with damaged, crumpled spines. A few looked as though they'd been sent flying at walls, their pages sticking out at odd angles. A librarian would have fainted at the sight of them.

"Are you going to say anything or am I getting paid for another hour of silence? Not that I mind, sweetheart. It's just that I like to know when I should bring in a magazine…or a pillow."

His eyes bored into Katniss' for several more silent seconds and then he leaned back. "Let's talk about Peeta Mellark."

Katniss picked at a curling edge of duct tape, sticking and unsticking it to the pad of her thumb. "No." she said to his stack of addiction books. Inside she was wincing. She _knew_ he would know. Was she so transparent that he could read everything in her face?

"Okay, then we can talk about Primrose."

Katniss gasped against the pain of hearing her sister's name. It was a kind of phantom pain, a throbbing ache caused by the loss of something that should be there, but wasn't. Two blonde braids, a pair of knowing blue eyes in a too young face rose in Katniss' mind. Then the sound of screaming.

"Prim or the boy. Your choice."

"I saw Peeta Mellark, okay." She spat out the words like spitting out grounded glass.

"And."

"And nothing," Katniss said. She tried to make out the title on the green book. The book's spine had peeled into a curly-cue. She tilted her head. It read _The Uncharted Road: Recovery and Relapse_.

"Did you speak to him?"

"No."

"He speak to you?"

"He said my name."

Dr. Abernathy crossed his arms over his chest. "And then you ran."

Katniss didn't say anything, just focused on radiating hate in his general direction. She hated that he even knew about Peeta, but Peeta had been around when she was hospitalized, when everyone still labeled her problem grief, and so his existence had made it into Dr. Aurelius' notes and then into the file sent to Dr. Abernathy.

Haymitch leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Okay, sweetheart. Tell me this. What do you see yourself doing next? How do you see the rest of your life going?"

Do? The future yawned ahead of her—sixty, maybe even seventy more empty years. The thought was suffocating, a cinderblock that pressed down on her chest, stole her breath, leaving her gasping and trembling.

"You're young and that's a lot of time to fill," he said, still reading her thoughts. "Friends make it easier…so I'm told. Don't know much about it, myself."

Katniss' lips curved, just a little, but she didn't look at him. Even before everything happened, she'd never been great at making friends and with his bad hygiene and horrible attitude, she guessed he wasn't either. Hopefully, that would be the only thing they had in common.

"I don't make friends," Katniss said to his stack of books.

"You told me Peeta comes from a rich family, has a decent job. Why do you think he's still living across from you? In this neighborhood?"

She knew what he was getting at, but Peeta wasn't her friend. She'd never thought of him that way. Their relationship had always been too complicated for a word that simple. "I don't want to talk about him anymore."

The silence built back up, weighed the room down until Dr. Abernathy let out a noisy breath. "You got something you _do_ want to talk about, sweetheart?"

"No."

"Well, let's do ourselves a favor and end early, huh? Maybe next time you can work on having an attitude that won't frighten small children."

Finally, for the first time that day, Katniss looked at Haymitch, cutting him with her eyes. He didn't have to say that and he knew it, she could see it in the way his eyes slide from hers, regretfully, knowing he'd gone too far. "I thought you were supposed to be a psychologist, not a bully."

He rubbed his hand up and down his week-old stubble. "Maybe attitude's something we can both work on next week."

Katniss nodded. She found her messenger bag slouched against the side of the couch, slung it over her shoulder and headed for the door.

"Katniss," Dr. Abernathy called, "You've started taking the new antidepressant Aurelius prescribed, right?"

She nodded, still watching the light blonde wood of the door. This pill was pink and oval instead of orange and oblong like the last ones or the green ones before that.

As far as Katniss could tell, none of them did much, except make her a zombie, especially the green ones. One morning, she'd woken up face-down in a bowl of soggy cereal she didn't remember pouring. Dr. Aurelius kept prescribing them anyway, convinced that one of the brightly colored pills would drag her back into the world.

"And you're not having any side effects? No hallucinations, like before."

"No."

"But it's not helping."

It wasn't a question.

Katniss grasped the knob and opened the door. She waved to Effie who continued to flip through her magazine and then pushed the clear glass door open. It was easier to leave here that to leave her apartment, probably because Haymitch's office wasn't anywhere she wanted to spend time.

She headed out onto the street, working hard to block out the sounds of the city, the crush of noises that threatened to smother and choke her. She listened to her own breathing instead, trying to keep it even as she slipped around the dog-walkers and the joggers, the mothers with strollers, the homeless man on the corner.

She made it back to her building in record time, back up the elevator, back to the safety of her apartment.

Something dropped to the ground when Katniss opened the door. Rolled into a tight spiral and secured with a green rubber band was a sheet of drawing paper. It was thick under her fingertips, cream-colored and slightly textured.

She didn't have to open it to know who it was from.

Katniss took it with her into the apartment, rolling it gently between her fingertips. She took it to her bedroom.

Not opening it seemed harder than opening it, even though she wasn't sure she wanted to know what it was. Sitting on the bed, she pulled the rubber band off quickly and let the page unfurl.

It was a drawing, beautifully rendered in pencil and ink, of a many-branched oak tree stretching out from one window to another. There was a little girl in the drawing, leaping from the extended branch of the tree to the window, a long braid whipping out behind her. Underneath were fours words: _My door's always open._

Katniss traced the words, going over and over the crooked loops of his handwriting. Peeta. He would use the day, the official day they met like a lure, making the longing for his presence sharp and new in her chest.

But the official day also brought with it the memory of the real day they'd met, the unofficial day, the day both of them almost died.

She'd seen Peeta at school for six months before that, of course, another of the hundred anonymous kids who didn't talk to her. That school wasn't _her_ school, where she'd gone from kindergarten to fifth grade, but the school she'd been forced to attend after the first worst day of her life, the day her father died, blown to bits fighting in a war she didn't understand.

He had died a hero, so everybody said, and that she should be proud, but all Katniss felt were the endless waves of anguish and anger that engulfed her because he hadn't keep his promise, that he'd lost his life in some dusty, distant place and didn't come home.

So they'd left the house by the woods her father had loved, she, her little sister Primrose, and her mother, and moved into the house where her mother had grown up to a place called Victory Village. Her grandparents had died years earlier, died never having spoken to Katniss or her sister, or even their own daughter in the last fifteen years because they'd hated her Katniss' father. He was too dark, too different from their expectations that they'd preferred to pretend their own daughter was dead and that their grandchildren didn't exist.

The house was in a better neighborhood, her mother had said, and had better schools. And it would save money in the long run. They wouldn't have to pay a mortgage.

Along with a casket, a medal and a folded flag, the government had given out death benefits to Katniss' family, but somehow, the at-first huge number began to shrink and then there were bills, bills and nightly phone calls her mother answered in hushed tones in the back room. This happened over and over until there didn't seem to be any money left at all.

The better neighbors in this upscale little village would have hated them for having the most rundown house on the block and no money to repair it. There had been the tiniest chance that they could have forgiven Katniss' mother and Primrose—they at least looked the part with their blonde hair and blue eyes, but her mother had also brought the dark-haired girl who took after her father into their fair community—another unsightly eyesore for them to endure.

The better school her mother promised excelled at teaching what it felt like to be a leper. It was an everyday lesson, walking into classrooms where the students alternately erupted in giggles or fell silent, being ignored by teachers, sitting alone every lunch period, completely invisible.

The day she met Peeta was cold, with just the barest begins of spring. Some mornings, after nightmares of her father dying, of the charred and ruined body that must have been in his closed casket, Katniss would slip out of the house and walk to the park at the corner of Breedlove and Seam.

There was a closer park in Victory Village, but it was smaller, more regular with its well-maintained fountains and wooden picnic tables.

Seam Park was wild, full of old trees and winding trails and it reminded her of her father, the times they spent in the woods together. It was a long walk in the faint dawn light, but worth it to be somewhere she didn't feel watched.

Katniss walked along the graveled paths before moving out into the more wooded area ringed with tall and elegant pine trees where there was a structure some city planner had decided was modern art, a golden funnel, huge, its wide mouth curved upwards towards the rising sun. Katniss liked to sit on the bench inside and wait as the sunrise lit the whole structure in flames that she could see even through closed eyelids, the oranges, reds, deep purples dancing and shimmering.

In two hours, she would have to be back in the airless school, but at that moment, leaning back in the light of a new day, bathed in gold, she home with her father and everything was right with the world.

Rough arms grabbed her from behind, pulled her up off the bench and flush with a body that smelled of old sweat and urine. Katniss arched like a cat, jerking sideways, but the hands held firm, the left lifting to clamp over her mouth, the right a hard band around her waist. The man started to move, flying through the park, holding her off the ground.

He slowed as he got farther away from the trail. The hand around her waist started to move and fingers crept down into her waistband. Katniss tried to squirm away from it, to scream, but he held her firm. She was breathing hard, her lips and nose held flat and closed against the dirty flesh of his hand that smelled vaguely like overripe bananas. He was breathing hard, too, excited, foul pants against the side her head.

Eager fingers slipped into her panties, probing, until there was a burning, ripping pain.

Tears stung at the corners of her eyes. No. Katniss wasn't going to let this man see her cry; she was going to fight. She put all her energy into one last twist away from his groping hand and she felt him almost lose his balance.

Something hard hit the man, knocking both of them to the ground. The hands released her and Katniss scrambled up, turning to see the man for the first time. He had a face like a bulldog with none of the charm. Deep, ragged wrinkles sank his jowls and hid his neck. His eyes, small and dark in his ugly face, shone with mirth.

Behind him was a boy about Katniss' age with ash-blond hair and blue eyes. She thought he was one of her neighbors, one of the trio of blond boys who lived next door. He'd pushed the man over.

His eyes locked with hers.

"Run!" the boy screamed, but Katniss was frozen in place as the man rounded on the boy, shoving him to his knees. He reared back and kicked the boy, hard, square in the chest. The boy curled up, trying to protect himself and the man kicked again, then a third time and fourth time, kicking with a kind of furious joy. The man seemed bent on stumping the boy into the ground.

 _He's going to kill him_. _He's going to kill him and then come for me._ The thought drifted through Katniss' mind, as gentle as a leaf on the wind, no urgency behind it. Everything, the man's attack, the boy being beaten in front of her, had taken on a nightmarish unreal quality—even the wetness seeping from the bruised flesh between her legs didn't seem real.

The boy groaned, jarring her back to the present and to the fact that she couldn't just stand there and let this happened. Katniss looked around, struggling to think of anything she could use as a weapon.

Scattered among the outcrops of rocks and scraggy grass were empty liquor bottles. Someone or a lot of someones must have used this isolated part of the park for a party.

Katniss crouched down and snatched the closet bottle, mashing it against a rock, the sound louder than the dull thud of the man's booted foot against the boy's body.

The man stopped, startled, and glanced at her, almost like he'd forgotten she existed.

"Get away from him," Katniss screamed. She held the broken bottle out like a knife, jagged edged pointed towards the man's face. Dark eyes traveled from the broken bottle to her face and Katniss held her breath.

Even with the bottle, she might not be able to win a fight with him. He was a grown man and she was a kid and small for her age, too, but she steeled herself. The moment dragged on, her holding the broken bottle and the man standing, foot poised over the boy crumpled on the ground.

And then, the man smirked, like the whole thing had been a huge joke, gave a little tiny, ironic wave and sauntered down the path, leaving behind the girl he kidnapped and the boy he almost killed.

Katniss sank down beside the boy, kneeling in a patch of puckered dandelion flowers, their yellow faces still closed against the cold. She could hear his breathing, a high, ragged wheeze.

"Katniss." He said her name—she didn't even know how he knew it.

Katniss found his hand and squeezed, there was nothing else she could do. "You're okay."

"Don't…feel okay." A cough crackled up from his chest, spattering his lips with blood, lips that were already turning blue. "Look, you…get out of here…might come back…."

"No." She couldn't leave him to get help, not with that man still around. And the boy needed help. His pale skin was blooming with bruises and he probably had internal wounds she couldn't see.

"Help!" Katniss started yelling the word over and over, wailed it, prayed it. It was all she could do. She screamed and screamed until her voice wasn't much louder than the rustle of the wind through the trees. And then they waited, the boy drifting in and out of consciousness, her trembling with cold and shock.

It took twenty-five minutes for someone to find them. At first, it was a jogger, a woman who stopped and stared at them, open-mouthed for a moment, before pulling out a cellphone and calling emergency services. Then the police came swarming, followed by paramedics. They came with their official-looking uniforms and insistent questions, but Katniss ignored them all. Strange how their presence didn't fill her with relief, just more fear. They were more adults, more unpredictable monsters and who knew what they'd do next?

As soon as they'd strapped the boy onto a stretcher, she let exhaustion and darkness take her.

She woke in the hospital where they made everything that happened worse, because they made it real. They said words like assault and juvenile victim and, when she still couldn't tell them her name or where she lived, they said emergency protective custody.

Then, her body was swabbed, clipped, photographed while Katniss had lain, limp as a doll, doing her best to pretend she wasn't there. Her own words had been swept away, lost, and she endured it all in silence.

Another hour passed before they connected her and the boy to the two missing kids from Victory Village. And then her mother was there, pale and shaking, telling her that it would be okay. But she was a liar—nothing had been okay since the day her father had died.

People talked to her, but she ignored them, except to nod when they asked if she wanted to go home.

They took her home and her mother made her favorite lamb stew, but she couldn't eat it. She couldn't sleep, either, not with the new nightmares added to the old ones of her father's death. Even her little sister, cuddled soft and warm beside her, couldn't stop the pictures in her head. Her thrashing tossed Prim from the narrow bed onto the hard floor that first night. Katniss wouldn't let her come back after that.

It only got worse. They didn't find the man, even after the police called to say that the boy had given them a description and that they would keep searching, even after what had happened was on the evening news, her and the boy identified as "two eleven-year-old victims."

After that, she couldn't sleep even to thrash around. All she could do was lie there and watch her window, wait for the man with the bulldog face to find her.

A week later, in the middle of another unsleeping night, a light came on in the room directly across from hers. Katniss had never paid much attention to the neighbors. They all seemed to wear the same expressions whenever she saw them, like they were insulted by her very existence, but she knew now that the boy lived there and that his name was Peeta Mellark.

His mother had come over to yell at her mother, saying that it was Katniss' fault, that she must have lured her son out to the park, that maybe she set the whole thing up with the bulldog-faced man to rob Peeta. After all, everyone knows that Katniss' _kind_ have criminal tendencies.

Katniss' mother, who'd been mostly out of it since her husband's death, rallied enough at that to tell the woman off and slam the door in the woman's face. Katniss had been proud of that.

The light had been off all week, but now it was on. That part of the house must have been an addition because it jutted out from the body of the building and was so close, only a large oak tree stood between the two houses on that side. Katniss had heard that one of the neighbors wanted to buy this house and build on the property. Maybe it was the Mellarks and that's why their house was almost touching hers.

Katniss got out of the tumbled sheets of the bed and went to see. The boy, Peeta, was standing framed in the light of his bedroom. He still looked injured, standing there with the window open to the cold spring night.

Looking back, Katniss was never sure why she did what she did, where the impulse came from or why she followed it. Opening the window, she threw herself out onto one of the long branches of the oak tree. It was easy. She had grown up climbing trees and this was a sturdy one. She edged her way from one branch to another, foot in front of foot like a tightrope walker until she was right under Peeta's window.

The boy stared at her. Katniss pulled herself up onto the ledge of his window.

"How are you?" The words came out sandpaper raw because they were the first words she'd spoken since the attack.

"You just jumped out the window. I mean…how did… _why_?" One of the boy's eyes was still swollen, but the other was wide with shock. A cast covered his left arm.

"I wanted to make sure you were okay."

"You could have used the door."

"It's after two in the morning…are you going to let me in?"

Still looking bewildered, Peeta moved back enough to let her into the room. His bedroom took up the whole length of the addition, but was almost empty of furniture except for a bed backed up against one wall and a side table.

The walls held all the personality in the room. The ceiling was an extension of the night sky, perfect with constellations and swirling, multicolored nebula clouds. On one wall, from ceiling to floor and across its entire length was a forest mural. A beach with ocean waves lapping at sand took up the wall behind the bed.

Katniss touched the forest scene, feeling the textured paint strokes under her fingertips. She traced a winding branch of a tree as it disappeared into a tangle of branches, just like on a real tree, just like in the woods by her house where she and her father would walk.

"You paint this?"

"Yeah." Peeta watched her as she moved around his room, touching his things. He was in sleep clothes, a t-shirt and pajama bottoms. Half his face was still the yellow and purple of healing bruises and, in the quiet room, she could hear a slight wheeze to his breathing.

"Spend a lot of time in the woods?"

"Not much chance around here. It's mostly just…." Peeta's jaw clenched, biting off whatever words he was going to say. "Well, you know." Seam Park was the closest thing to a forest for a hundred miles.

Memories came back and she was surrounded by the smell of pine trees and sweat and dirty skin and blood. Fear and adrenaline roared to life inside her.

Katniss suddenly realized that she didn't know why she had come here, she didn't know why she was in some strange boy's bedroom after midnight. To thank him? Maybe, but now, she couldn't find any words and shame began to slither in her chest, shame that he had seen what that man was doing to her, shame that she'd needed help in the first place, shame that helping her had gotten him hurt.

"I'm sorry…I should go," Katniss headed back towards the room. "I'm glad you're okay and everything, but I should go." She was about to climb up to the window sill when she felt Peeta's hand on her shoulder, warm and gentle.

"Hey, stop." He waited until she turned back to him and then he dropped his hand. "You shouldn't go climbing out windows if you're upset."

"I'm not upset."

He watched her for a long moment. "Fine, you're not upset. That makes one of us."

Katniss headed back towards the window, climbed up to the ledge and swung her legs out.

"It'd be okay, if you were, you know," Peeta said behind her. "Upset that is. Angry, too. I know I am. Every time I close my eyes I see everything that happened and I hate him, that he could come along and _take_ …." He left the words to hang there and they both knew what those words meant. "Anyway if you ever want to come back, my door, _err_ , window is always open."

Outside the window, it was still dark, but the streetlights were on up and down the street, so Katniss could see both her yard and his. She looked down at her legs still hanging over the edge of the window, swinging out into the open air, her skin glowing silver in the light of the moon. "Do you think he'll come back? Try to find us?"

A drawn out breath at her back, "No, with the cops hunting him, I think he'll try to disappear."

"Then he'll go somewhere else, do this to somebody else. And that's it? We live with it?"

Silence. A look over her shoulder showed Katniss that he's stretched himself out on his bed. "I could tell you some crap about not letting that jerk win, but he won't lose a minute of sleep about what he did unless he gets caught. I don't know about you, but I can't give up on life because some maniac decided to start his morning hurting a couple of kids."

Another pause, and then more quietly. "I do wish there was some way we could fight back, something that would _count_."

The wind picked up outside the window, shivering the remains of last fall's leaves left on the trees and sending gooseflesh across Katniss' skin. Across the yard, her vacant room with its crumpled bed lay waiting for her to toss in it and watch the shadows.

"Can I stay here, tonight?" It was stupid to ask. She couldn't stay in some boy's room. What would happen if her mother or her sister came looking for her? And he was a stranger, no matter how strongly this experience bound her to him, and it did bind, giving them a kind of kinship, allowing her talk to him when she couldn't even say one word to her own family. "It's just…I have nightmares," Katniss whispered.

"If you want," Peeta said after a moment. "No one comes up here, anyway, and all the rest of the rooms are on the other side of the house…and…I don't feel like being alone either."

She scooted back in through the window, bending her legs like pretzels to pivot through the small opening. She stood, hesitant for a moment before going over to the bed. It was wide, a queen-size or king. Katniss sat at the edge and looked at Peeta. "Just for a little while."

"I said my win-door is always open," Peeta said, his words muffled by the arm he had swung over half his face. His eyes were already closed.

"Okay," she said. She'd sat there a moment longer, watching the peaceful deep breaths of the boy before slipping into the warmth of his sheets and closing her eyes. This was the day Katniss thought of as the official day they met, the first time she felt him beside her in the dark, helping her fight off the monsters in her mind.

Now, in her tiny apartment, Katniss curled herself around the drawing he'd made, closed her eyes and tried to remember what is felt like not to be alone.

 ***Trigger Warning: This chapter contain a depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftermath.**


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I don't know why I did it; I shouldn't have. I should have just gone down the elevator and forgotten that I saw her. I shouldn't have spent thirty minutes of time I didn't have to draw a picture of days that ended over a decade ago.

My eyes followed the path of a basketball as it bounced from the hand of a skinny sixth-grade in front of me and back to the ground. He, and the dozen other kids in the lot, had been going at it all recess and the rhythmic pounding was giving me a headache. No, scratch that. It wasn't the basketballs or the high-pitched laughter of the children or the constant squawk of the whistle giving me a headache; it was all the questions bouncing through my head.

"There are better ways to catch flies, you know." Finnick Odair said. He pointed to my mouth. "Might want to close that."

"I guess I'll take your suggestion, Odair—you would know seeing how your mouth's always open."

Finnick flashed his toothpaste-ad smile and laughed. He used to be a teen model or something, but now he taught English Lit to eighth-graders in one of the poorest districts in the city. He was also one of my closest friends.

When I was younger, I kept a lot of friends, lived near the center of every party, but that was before. It was something Finnick and I had in common; we were both former golden boys.

We were standing in what passed for gym at P.S. 12—a square of asphalt with a hoop at one end and a beat-up set of monkey bars at the other end. It was outside, but the surrounding buildings were so tall, the only way to see the sky was to look straight up.

The school had a real gym, but it was closed for repairs—as it had been since I started working here last school-year. The school didn't have money for repairs—it didn't have money to hire a separate P.E. teacher either, so me and a few other teachers rotated and "volunteered" for the task.

It was only fair that I volunteered. The school had an art teacher because they got an anonymous endowment that stipulated it be used for an arts program. They could probably have patched that leaky roof in the gym or hired another "real" teacher if they weren't required to have me.

"So, is there a reason you're standing there slack-jawed? Did somebody run over your brand-new puppy? Bad news this morning?"

I missed the morning classes for a doctor's visit. I had to keep up a strict schedule of visits in the last year, nothing out of the ordinary—just another part of getting half your leg blown off. "I saw Katniss today."

"You mean the girl that doesn't leave the house? Well, yeah seeing the ex is tough."

"She's not my ex."

"I don't think a girl you haven't seen in months counts as a current relationship."

I tilted my head up towards the tiny square of sky above us, brilliant blue against the slate gray of the buildings. Ultramarine and phthalo blues against a mixed gray of purple and yellow. "I have to know she'll be alright."

"Good news, then, you saw her," Finnick says. "And unless you've gone stalker, I'm guessing it was outside her apartment. She's alright. Problem solved."

The problem wasn't solved. I thought back to look on her face, the way she had hunched down, arms wrapped around herself in that elevator. She wasn't okay, but she was outside and I wanted to talk to her. I'd left a drawing for her after that, a reminder that I was still here for her.

"I was going to marry her," I said.

" _Was_ is the operative word in that sentence." Finnick came over to put a hand on my shoulder. "Come out to East Street with us on Friday. Have some fun." East Street was a bar some of the teachers went to after work.

"I know your kind of fun."

"That's why I suggested it. Find another girl…." He gave a long pause. "You know what? Forget it. This is starting to sound like Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet. You're going to meet some girl there and somehow I'll end up stabbed to death."

"It was Benvolio who suggested they go to the Capulet's party and Mercutio who ended up stabbed. You'd think a literature teacher would know that."

Finnick grinned again. "Yeah, but I'm the handsome and clever one, my friend, and that was definitely Mercutio."

A fourth-grade girl ran up to us. "Two boys are fighting in the hallway," she said between puffs of breath. We looked at each other and sighed. A fight meant a half hour pulling the two boys off each other and wrangling them to the office and then another thirty minutes filling out paper work.

"It's going to be a long day," I said.

"You've only been here an hour," Finnick said as we got to the ring of kids watching the boys go at it.

"I know."

Home was a hollowed place when I got there. No word from Katniss. Her door was still closed, as closed and impenetrable as it had been for the last year. I stared at it as I passed, willed it to open, for her to give me one of her shy smiles or even one of her trademark scowls. This morning had jarred me, seeing her again after so long and then taking the time to draw that picture, reawakening those long-ago memories.

It wasn't like I could forget; it was seared into my brain. Seeing her framed in my window was like coming home even though I was in my own room.

I've gotten used to her showing up like that, on my best and worst days. It's almost like there's a pattern that I can't understand, hovering just out of reach, that determined if she would show up again.

I've always been practical—no magic, no prayers, just what I can see, but, when it comes to Katniss, I have never been able to shake the feeling that we were fate. It's stupid, I know, but every time I saw Katniss, it felt like the first time I held a paintbrush in my hand—something I would love forever. Fate.

She had been fate from the day her family moved into the dilapidated house next door, a haunted fairytale house with dark green ivy crawling up its sides, and I saw the little girl that looked as lost as I felt inside. It was fate the day I jogged to the park instead of around the block, to see where the girl with the dark braids was going alone in the dark. And it was fate when she came to me later.

It was never strange between the two of us. It felt natural that she would slip in through the window, steal into my room from the branches of the oak tree like a wood nymph, to sleep next to me.

When we were eleven, it'd been simple. we were both too young to think much about it, beyond knowing that our parents wouldn't like it. I just wanted her beside me in the dark. It was innocent back then and it stayed that way for a solid two years.

That last night I'd waited for her, one eye shiny and purple. She'd come in silently, dressed in a t-shirt and sleep shorts and frowning, but I'd been a tiny bit proud as she lain her head on the pillow next to me, her pillow, the one that smelled like her and drove me crazy with missing her on the nights she didn't come. If anyone in my family ever bothered to pay attention, they might have wondered why their thirteen-year-old son's pillow smells like a girl's shampoo.

"I fought Tyler today," I whispered.

"I know. You shouldn't have." She was mad, giving me a patent scowl but inched closer anyway, wiggling her cold feet until I trapped them between my warm ones.

"Why not? He deserved it." I wrapped my arm around her waist and dropped my head to her long dark hair, breathing in its scent and feeling her relax in my arms. I held her as tight as I could.

Whenever I stuck around the main house, I heard the way my parents talked about Katniss and her mother, the foul words they used when then didn't think anyone was listening, but it was nothing compared to the things my classmates said—that her mother was crazy, that all they ate were squirrels shot out of trees, that she was a whore who did men out in Seam park for food.

That comment was the last straw, the one that had finally sent me over the edge. After what happened in the park, my mother forced me to swear never to tell anyone that it'd been me with Katniss—having bruises wasn't unusual, not with a mother like mine—but most people knew the girl had been Katniss.

I'd seen what that monster had done and the aftermath, the sleepless nights and shivering fears. I couldn't let her pain become someone's punchline.

I'd finally broke and took a swing at one of those idiots, Tyler Cato, who, until a few months before, had been closer to me than my brothers. I'd gotten a black eye out of it, but the other boy had walked away bloody and with a broken nose.

And I was suspended for the week.

"Tyler's your friend," Katniss said around a yawn and then she wouldn't look at me, just out the window. "You shouldn't fight with your friends about me."

"And what does that make you?" It was something I'd wonder about since she showed up at my window because I didn't understand it.

At night, we'd spend hours together, talking about everything I couldn't talk to my friends about. As far as I was concerned, Katniss was my best friend. She was my best friend…but I wasn't hers.

At school, Katniss refused to talk to me. There was no way to bring her into my crowd, but I wouldn't have cared. I would've given up my idiot friends in a heartbeat to spend time with her. We passed each other in the hall and she ignore me, brush me off in the lunch room, duck her head and turn the other way.

And there was something else, too, the only thing I couldn't talk to her about, because I knew it would send her running.

I had a crush on her.

I hadn't meant to. It wasn't something I'd planned, but it had hit suddenly, like lightening, when I realized I couldn't stop drawing her.

One day I'd been working hard to get the tilt of her head just right on the page, because I loved that about her. The thought had been bare, right there in my mind, and obvious. I loved the tilt of her head, the soft look in her eyes just before she slept, and everything else about her.

Keeping my feelings a secret with her lying next to me was a feat. It helped that she was oblivious to that sort of thing.

Kids our age dated at school, held hands at lunch, stole kisses, but Katniss kept her head down, didn't notice, even though there were guys that looked at her. Even the guys that acted like they hated her were mostly just mad she ignored their existence.

"I can fight my own battles," she said.

"I know."

"And I don't like you getting hurt. I hate it."

"Why?"

She gave me an impatient huff. "Just shut up and go to sleep."

I pulled back to make her look at me. She was so pretty in the diffused moonlight of the room, silver eyes and soft brown skin. "Why do you care if I get hurt or not? If we're not friends?"

She didn't answer, but reached up to trace the curve my eyebrow where my skin was still shiny and bruised.

And then she leaned forward and kissed me, her mouth tingly warm on mine and just the slightest bit clumsy, but still perfect—perfect for me. I'm sure I was just as clumsy and lost; it was my first kiss, after all.

Earlier, I said that everything with Katniss always had the weight of fate. With us, fate always seemed to come in pairs: good and bad.

My mother, who had only ever noticed me to complain, who hated everything about the way I'd painted the bedroom, who had never stepped foot in my room even when I was sick, opened the door.

Her outraged roar broke us apart and Katniss scrambled away from me like a frightened cat, taking away her warmth. The lights flicked on overhead, blinding me for a minute.

"What the hell is going on!" Her hair was done up in pink rollers and she was in her nightgown, faded and stained and gray.

"I…" I couldn't find my words. I swallowed, looking from my mother to Katniss, who had backed herself against the wall near the window.

"You're been letting _her_ in here?" She said _her_ like it was a curse word. My mother came further into the room, looked Katniss up and down, sneered with disgust.

"Don't," I said. "She didn't do anything wrong."

She reached out, shook the bedpost. "You don't understand, you stupid creature! Their kind? She's like a little bitch in heat. I won't have you ruining your life and my life with this _shit_."

"I'm leaving. I'll go." Katniss said it under her breath. She wasn't crying, but she was shaking. She didn't move.

"You better get out! Get out whatever way you got in." My mother looked around. "Was it the window?"

"Stop it! Stop talking to her!" I said. "We didn't do anything!"

She pointed to me and then back to Katniss. "And you hear that? You didn't do anything with that boy so, don't come crying back here with any little whelps."

"Leave her alone!" I was crying—hot, angry tears.

"You think you're the only ones she goes slinking around with? Stop being stupid!"

Katniss moved to the window, slid through the opening and was gone into the night.

My mother came over to the bed, gripped my arm and pulled me to the edge. She looked me in the eye and spit in my face. And then, as the cherry on top, she slapped me, backhanded me so hard I fell to the floor. It wasn't the first time and it wouldn't have hurt so much if my face wasn't already bruised.

"If you ever do something like this again, you're out of this house. Do you hear me? You're gone."

I didn't answer her. She wasn't expecting one, anyway. And then she was gone, too.

I had lain there on the floor, looking up at the ceiling painted to look like the night sky, knowing that everything was ruined, that Katniss wouldn't be back. I'd lain there and cried.

The ceiling now was plain because the apartment was a rental, a stubbly white, but I was still worrying over the same girl, still wanted her beside me in the dark. It's amazing how nothing had changed in thirteen years.


End file.
